In the abstract, task management focuses on the process relating to what, how, when and by whom a task is planned, executed and completed. In concrete terms, this facet of task management is analogous to task definition, message exchange, events and reminders, and actionable parties and contacts. Through a view of a “To-Do” list in context, task management also helps to organize, prioritize and monitor a set of tasks that make up a work activity for an individual. Each of these facets can be supported through various means through the use of task management applications; the second are related to managing issues of interactions among different tasks.
Providing efficient, automated task management is important. In particular, users are now able to collaborate and interact on a global basis more easily than ever before, in large part due to recent advances in mobile computing and wide area data communication. Presently, geographically separated and mobile users are able to freely exchange messages over connected and wireless networks irrespective of location or time through the use of mobile computing platforms, including pen-based tablet personal computers, personal digital assistants and integrated mobile devices. The devices provide suitable platforms with which to model and manage tasks and task sets, such as sets of To-Do list items.
The ease of communicating globally has greatly increased user expectations in nearly every area of automation, including automated task management. Electronic mail, or simply, “email,” is one example of how communications have evolved with user expectations. Historically, email contained only plain text and was available at little or no cost through a wide spectrum of conventionally connected “wired” devices. Advances in bandwidth and computational power allowed larger and more elaborate forms of messages and email evolved from plain text to formatted multimedia-capable information that could include attached documents and hyperlinks to external sources. Similarly, the Worldwide Web, or simply, “Web,” has become the medium of choice to provide low cost and widely circulated information dissemination.
To some degree, email has begun to merge with task management as a natural extension of the communications process. Tasks are often communicated through email and the “In” Box in which a user stores email frequently becomes the central hub around which a task is managed. Unfortunately, email clients generally provide a poor surrogate for effective task management.
Email clients belong to a genre of vertically-aligned office management applications that include word processing, spreadsheet, slide preparation, and similar applications, which perform a single, core function. As a result, email clients primarily facilitate the composition, exchange and storage of email, with limited collaborative capabilities. Some email clients, such as Outlook, licensed by Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, Calif., include additional functionality for tracking activities, events, contacts, and similar tightly-scoped data. Task management only applications offer similar functions. However, these functions are only loosely integrated and lack underlying logic to create a coherent activity-based framework that can assist a user in taking action relative to a task.
Moreover, email clients and task management only applications generally store the activities, events, contacts, and similar data as static objects. Each item is treated as a storage container that merely records data. Operational logic inherent in the application can operate on the data to generate, for instance, a reminder to perform a scheduled activity. However, these applications lack logic associated through an external framework to model the tasks and provide triggers to generate additional actions by discovering inferences and relationships between the items.
Finally, email clients and task management only applications visualize the activities, events, contacts, and similar data as static objects along a single dimension relative to the core aspect of the item being visualized. For instance, activities are visualized in an event-centric manner using a “To-Do” list view. Events are visualized in an event-centric manner using a day, week or month calendar view. Contacts are visualized in a contacts-centric manner using a contacts database view. Due to such unipolar perspectives, these applications fail to identify interdependencies or conflicts between items, particularly with respect to different types of items, such as activities and events, which can both implicate deadlines.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach to providing a framework facilitating dynamic task management through logic modeling interdependencies and conflicts between individual task-oriented items. Preferably, such an approach would accommodate managing ad hoc collections of activities, events, contacts, and similar data through user selectable task modeling paradigms.
There is a further need for an approach to providing visualization of metadata representing the interdependencies and conflicts discovered by a dynamic task management environment. Preferably, such an approach would present integrated visualizations of disparate task-oriented items and would highlight the interdependencies and conflicts through visual or other means.